Who's doing the concealing?

The Guardian today publishes excerpts from editorials of several newspapers throughout the world on the subject of aid to Africa. Of particularly odius note was the one from The New York Times, which was quoted as saying:

Most Americans believe that the US spends 24% of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1%.

The actual editorial went on to say:

The United States currently gives just 0.16 percent of its national income to help poor countries, despite signing a United Nations declaration three years ago in which rich countries agreed to increase their aid to 0.7 percent by 2015. Since then, Britain, France and Germany have all announced plans for how to get to 0.7 percent; America has not. The piddling amount Mr. Bush announced yesterday is not even 0.007 percent.

This is a mistaken and highly deceptive way of looking at the aid issue, particularly in terms of the US. In a relatively capitalistic and free economy such as the US, the notion of government expenditures relative to "national income" is fairly meaningless, because the government does not own or control most of the income. Individual citizens do. So it makes little sense to look at foreign aid provided only by the government, for doing so ignores the vast majority of aid provided by the US in the form of aid from churches, foundation grants, corporate charity (both in cash and goods/services...think of the big bad phramaceuitical companies that donate millions of dollars worth of medical supplies), individual donations and volunteering, not to mention the billions in personal remittances that new American citizens send back to their families in poor countries. Getting accurate figures on these is difficult, but Carole Adelman, a former USAID official, estimated that in 2000, private foreign aid amounted to over $35 billion (this compares with official government aid of $22.6 billion). And this number is almost certainly a conservative figure, as it has relied on voluntary reporting and surveys. Indeed, the Inter-American Development Bank has estimated that just personal remittances to Latin America alone amounted to over $30 billion in 2004. For more, see Bruce Bartlett's commentary from January.

The New York Times closed its editorial with the following (also included in The Guardian):

The American people have a great heart. President Bush needs to stop
concealing it.

It seems to me that The New York Times needs to stop concealing it by pretending that funds coerced from the population to be given to politcally approved causes is the only true measure - or indeed any kind of measure at all - of the generosity of a nation. And it wouldn't hurt if The Guardian stopped passing such garbage on to its British audience, too.